


The Deputy Regional Coordinator of The Civil Service Stabilisation Cadre is Dead; Long Live The Deputy Regional Coordinator of The Civil Service Stabilisation Cadre

by westwoodandridingcrops



Series: 2nd Sheriarty 30 Day Challenge [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 03:23:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11614848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westwoodandridingcrops/pseuds/westwoodandridingcrops
Summary: Death comes for the DRC of the CSSC.





	The Deputy Regional Coordinator of The Civil Service Stabilisation Cadre is Dead; Long Live The Deputy Regional Coordinator of The Civil Service Stabilisation Cadre

It began at around 5:26 in the morning when emergency medical personnel were dispatched to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on King Charles Street.

Or, rather, it began sometime earlier than that when the DRC of the CSSC slumped over his desk and succumbed to sudden cardiac death despite his apparently normal heart and semi-consistent exercise routine.

But in actuality, after the results of the state-mandated autopsy, it was concluded that it might have begun during a sudden ventricular dysrhythmia secondary to minimal myxomatous mitral valve changes.

Although, in light of Uncle Rudy’s similarly untimely death, it probably began while Mycroft formed in the womb. It was then when, using the mutant allele he’d inherited on chromosome Xq28, he would have begun constructing the excessively fat mitral valve that likely killed him.  
  
However it began, though, it progressed with no pomp and little circumstance aside from the poorly attended and purposefully generic funeral that had, naturally, been planned well in advance by the deceased himself.

Mrs. Hudson’s sobs caught in her throat every so often. Holding her hand, more for Mrs. Hudson’s comfort than her own, Rosie amused herself by twirling her pigtails or occasionally staring curiously at the other attendees, perhaps searching for some meaning in their faces.

Dad and Mummy clasped and unclasped each other’s hands, sniffling intermittently and staring resolutely at their respective shoes.

John stood between Mrs. Hudson and Sherlock, sometimes chewing the inside of his cheek and sometimes casting furtive glances at Sherlock from the corner of his eye.

Sherlock stood and also occasionally stared curiously at the other attendees.

Jim, for his part, blinked at the news and closed his laptop.

* * *

 His disguise, as all good disguises are, was less a change in appearance and more a change in demeanor. In truth, the bearing of a removed, pseudo-relative come to see what he could wheedle out of the deceased’s dying was only somewhat an affectation and the ‘just thrown on’ look to his clothes was merely the finishing touch on this performance.

Had he been an ounce more like the deceased himself, he wouldn’t have bothered making the trip. He’d have known that there was nothing to see in even the most sanctus of Mycroft Holmes’ sanctorums. But, he had long grown unused to denying himself much of anything, and he wanted to know. He wanted to observe the odds and ends that wouldn’t mean anything to the casual observer, the retroactive details of how such a man lived as if the house were the sparsely stocked museum to his last living equal:

“Armchair” by Stocktons, late 90s

Leather

On August something, in 2001, Mycroft Holmes believed he would be coming home to rest from an arduous week at work only to receive the news, while seated in this particular piece, that his little brother had, once again, collapsed at a crime scene.

On loan from Baker Street, for a limited time, the aforementioned little brother himself, here seen at the foot of said chair, surrounded by various other of his late brother’s belongings. 

“He would say you’re being sentimental,” Jim observed, casting a glance around the house and placing his hands on the back of the armchair opposite Sherlock. That alone was telling, Jim thought to note. That a solitary man had two armchairs in a configuration similar to that of Baker Street, a seat perhaps permanently reserved for the visitor now sitting across from it.  
  
“Probably so. He usually did,” Sherlock said, packing things into boxes less carefully than their original owner would have likely preferred. “He would also say you were dead. If only, to keep up pretenses.”  
  
“Well,” Jim tittered a little under his breath. “All three of us are dead, for that matter. Depending on who you asked.”  
  
“After all this, I should hope it isn’t an act,” Sherlock said, continuing to paw through the items strewn about the floor, sorting them into piles by no discernible common factor. “I doubt it is, though.”  
  
Jim tilted his head in concession and cast a glance about the sitting room, “It’s not what I expected, somehow.”  
  
Sherlock shook his head at a tightly wound cable before deciding that it went into a box, “You were expecting some sort of barren minimalism. Had you known him better, you would have realized that he had to have some outlet for indulgence. Food, movies, and décor, to name a few.”

He paused only long enough to look up at Jim and to smile tightly, without his eyes. The gesture was so reminiscent of the dearly departed that Jim blinked once and almost smiled himself; it wasn’t very different than watching a toddler trying to tie his father’s tie on. Before the moment had truly begun, though, Sherlock was extending an arm for a mantelpiece clock as though to move it down by a telekinetic force of will. It worked after a fashion, Jim thought, as he rolled his eyes and stepped forward to place the clock in Sherlock’s hand.  
  
“That…makes a lot of sense, actually,” Jim sat in the armchair as a few bits of Mycroft trivia he knew clicked into place. “But, I was talking about the whole thing. Circumstances are fine. Timing is off. I was expecting him to outlive me. To properly outlive me.”  
  
Sherlock huffed in a sort of amusement, “You can imagine _my_ surprise, then.”  
  
At this, Jim ducked his down in emphatic agreement. Sherlock’s surprise at his own precarious survival was, in fact, the first thing that had occurred to him after the news had made its way to him.  “Is it yours now?”  
  
“Sorry?” Sherlock said quickly, almost interrupting him, all while still appraising the clock.

“The house. Are you moving in?”  
  
“No.” In a split second, Jim concluded that he was selling it, in that case; a course of action so eminently practical that he doubted it had been Sherlock’s idea in the first place. “Well. Yes. It’s mine. But I’m keeping the flat. I don’t need a lot of room,” he finished by way of explanation, tinging the ‘I’ with emphasis.  
  
_Ah_.

“Won’t that cramp your co-parenting?”   
  
Sherlock grunted softly and noncommittally. “It’s got a makeshift screening room and enough yard for a dog. It seems the sort of thing a godfather ought to do.”

Evidently, the clock had failed to make the cut in favor of a picture frame with no picture in it which eventually did go into the box after some inspection. It proved to be a somewhat bittersweet revelation for Jim. On the one hand, it betrayed in Sherlock a newfound consideration for this sort of domesticity. On the other, it meant an unencumbered flat in which to conduct their semi-annual trysting.  All in all, Jim could mark it a draw in the old and ever-present tally that he kept between himself and John if only to dust it off and to regard it on special occasions.  
  
Jim shrugged it off before the glint of introspection caught Sherlock’s eye, “That seems right. My godfather turned out to be my actual father, though, so I don’t suppose I’m any sort of authority.”  
  
Sherlock snorted back laughter, a decidedly unattractive noise and yet a strangely warming one. “I spent all of Year 5 convinced that Mycroft was actually my uncle’s. It explained the favoritism and, as a plus, made us somewhat more distantly related. I resented it then, but I suppose I should have been grateful that my uncle picked him as a sort of protégé or, in light of everything that you know happened, my sister might have eventually succeeded in killing me.”  He tossed an outdated phone behind himself and muttered again

Jim picked not to volunteer his knowledge that that was precisely what would have happened without proto-Mycroftian intervention, one way or the other. “What’s going to happen to her now?” he asked as an afterthought, having devoted no time at all to consider what would happen to that particular sibling.

“I haven’t let her know yet,” Sherlock shrugged back, just as casually, “I haven’t let her know yet but she’ll piece it together soon enough. I imagine she’ll react with some combination of relief and concern that she won’t be treated as indulgently.”

Jim smiled wickedly in spite of himself. In all these years, he had never once failed to be entertained by Sherlock’s astuteness in regards to others and his utter dullness when it came to himself.

Sherlock caught the joke and seemed neither pleased nor terribly offended by it. “Why? What will happen to you?”  
  
“Happen to me?” Jim’s initial response might have been to sneer at the idea that this had any terribly far-flung implications for him. But to know Sherlock was to know his self-centeredness and even know it didn’t occur to him that what might be a monumental disaster for him might be just Sunday afternoon for someone else. “I don’t expect anything will happen to me,” Jim said, a touch more measuredly than he might have at any other time.  
  
Sherlock knitted his eyebrows, uncomprehending of Jim’s unperturbedness.  
  
“Sherlock, it’s good that you’re already sitting down for this, I guess, but your brother and I didn’t represent the eternal battle between good and evil. Sometimes, we owed each other favors and neither of us ever really tried to win for good.”  
  
It almost looked like Sherlock was still attempting to process that Jim was not, in fact, the incarnate manifestation of Chaos to counter his brother as the ultimate agent of Order.  
  
“Don’t get me wrong,” Jim interrupted Sherlock’s thought process if only to spare him further confusion, “In the beginning, I had one or two Antheas shot and I’m not ever going to forget what it’s like to disappear into those little gray cells of his, either. I’m not embarrassed to admit that your brother was the only person I ever considered a threat, but it’s been a long while. Eventually, we _had_ to be civil. It’s already complicated if you and your enemy both know each other’s soft spot, it’s perpetual deadlock if…you know…”  
  
Sherlock huffed a little and continued about his business.

“What? I thought you’d be happy. Turns out, in the end, that everything really _is_ all about you.”

“Yes, but what happens now?” The concern was enough to make him stop once again and was, if Jim was honest, a little touching if misplaced.

“What happens next is that I’m going to get a whole lot richer and the Crown is going to get a whole lot poorer. Whoever shows up to work tomorrow morning isn’t going to be Mycroft. Besides, since we’re already apparently, being disgustingly honest…” Jim leaned forward a touch in his chair, closing in on his objective, “that all ignores the real question. What’s going to happen to you?”

A million different answers—nothing, everything, anything—suggested themselves and threatened to make themselves manifest on Sherlock’s face as he walked through every possibility and decided against each of them. “I…”

“Haven’t thought about it?” Jim suggested. 

“…don’t know,” Sherlock admitted, endearing as he lost in the valiant effort to not appear quite so adrift.

What would happen was that John would gain a house but lose a flat and Sherlock would make the responsible decision that he assumed Mycroft would approve of, but in the process, would lose a flatmate, quite possibly the only person in London not privy to the open secret that was Jim and Sherlock. What would happen was that John would carry on with the life he was supposed to be living and would leave Sherlock with very little ties to anyone or anywhere. What was happening was the incipient prospect of evolving from biting, inimical texts that eventually became more suggestive ones, past the occasional desperate appearance in each other’s doorway that had sustained Jim for years now, and towards the possibility of stealing Sherlock from London definitively.

“You have ideas,” cut in Sherlock, a little amusedly, having evidently watched Jim as he made these sorts of breakneck leaps and bounds to land on the conclusion he’d been forestalling for a long time. “Obviously.”

“None of them good, I’m afraid. All terribly disrespectful of the dearly departed and completely inappropriate.” Jim shook his head a little before letting his eyes soften just a touch. “For someone who insists on being alone so much, you’ve always been pretty terrible at it, you know.” 

Sherlock nodded in wordless assent to this, seemingly, in assent to the entire proposition. “All lives end, all hearts are broken” he quoted a little wistfully, “A string of good ideas, a series of bad ideas in between. They apparently don’t make much difference when it’s all said and done.”

Jim didn’t think he’d ever agreed with anything more in his entire life.

* * *

The best part of their refractory periods was that it allowed them to smoke and to talk in between sessions. Sherlock showed off; presented the evidence for a particularly difficult case and unraveled it before Jim’s eyes. He explained how he’d followed Mary across the world and confessed to how fascinated he was with the child, ‘Rosie’ as he called her. All the little ways in which her stubbornness revealed her as half John’s and of how the little twinkle she’d get in her eyes after knowingly defying her father betrayed her as half Mary’s. He spoke of his sister and all the strange ways he recognized himself, his brother, and his parents in her and the jarring way in which, suddenly, she’d say something and he knew her not at all and lacked any point of reference for her.

He told stories about Mycroft that Jim might have killed for in a different time, sometimes smirking at his own memories and sometimes growing taciturn at them. In return, Jim had stories to trade about his brother, too. He bragged as gently as he could about each time he’d surprised Mycroft and had driven him to distraction. He showed off with far-flung plans and schemes that were beautiful in their elegance until Sherlock begrudgingly gave in and smiled at his cleverness and they could return to the physical.

It was less time than their usual rendezvous but less tinged with urgency and superficiality.  They could afford to tacitly agree on sleeping together, not just in the metaphorical sense, but literally beside one another in a way they hadn’t since Isla del Maiz once on Sherlock’s sabbatical. Jim fell asleep silently gloating to himself over this, his final, most decisive, and kindest meant victory over Mycroft’s intentions.

* * *

 When Jim came to, lying in his own sweat and buried face down in his pillow, he was awoken by the rain outside the room and the muffled sounds of activity inside the room. He slit open his eyes only long enough to verify that it wasn’t morning and rolled over, thoroughly annoyed, “Sleep,” he whined, fully intending to do the same himself. The padding back and forth across the room continued, though, in spite of his orders.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, launching a pillow blindly off the bed in hopes of hitting Sherlock.

“Going to work,” the deep voice answered.  
  
"What?" Jim said blearily and clearly disgusted with Sherlock’s answer. Whoever was dead would surely stay dead until morning, Jim assumed, no need for any rush.

 "I'm going to work," Sherlock repeated. Something in the way he emphasized work irritated Jim like a splinter under his skin, very vaguely and for no reason at all. They had, over time, developed the ability to hear the subtleties in one another and as subconscious and inexplicable as it might have been, it sat incongruously ill with Jim that he believed he had heard Sherlock say he was going to work, rather than going to his Work.

It made him open his eyes. He had once spent enough hours in his youth agonizing over what a different lapel meant and what the roundedness of a waistcoat suggested about the wearer, that even in the dimness of the lamp light, he could tell that Sherlock had absolutely never worn as serious and stuffy a suit as he was wearing now. 

His hindbrain caught onto the idea that something truly monstrous was happening before his rational mind had clicked everything into pieces and his heart began to race. Suddenly wide awake, he sat up in bed and stared.  

"Sherlock, what are you doing?” Jim said, the attempt at phrasing the question casually fraying with the nervous high-pitch his voice took on.

Sherlock hummed lightly in response, evidently unwilling to answer. 

"What the _fuck_ are you doing, Sherlock?"

What he was doing, at the moment, was moving to the nightstand to collect his brother’s cufflinks. "I've said...."

In one fluid motion, Jim gathered sheets around himself and bounded off the bed and onto his feet so that he stood almost chest-to-chest with Sherlock. "I know what you said, you son of a bitch." He bit back.  Of its own accord, his mind had laid out all of the vulnerabilities Sherlock had shown him and was quickly tossing them into piles of ‘Genuine,’ ‘Fake,’ or ‘Indeterminate.’ Impossibly wide-eyed, he announced before he was even done, “I’m going to kill you.”

The crown of Sherlock's head shook as he did up the clasp on his watch. “You won’t.”  Jim snarled in retaliation at Sherlock's uncharacteristic even-temperedness, but he was right, he wouldn't.  
  
"Well," Jim said, a false smile suddenly twisting his features as if it had always been there. He was Protean, he was shifting into whatever shape he needed to be and trying on whatever he thought would give Sherlock pause. "You shouldn't have told me where baby-girl and her puppy are going to live, then, should you have?" 

"Why not? Do you intend to hurt them?" 

He might have hesitated even before, but now? After each loving description of how he could tell she had reached a new cognitive milestone? After how privileged he had felt to hear Sherlock's admission that he'd watched YouTube tutorials with one arm around a squirming toddler, teaching himself how to style her fine hair? It suddenly wasn't even worth the energy to consider how much of it had been Sherlock’s premeditated effort to protect them and how much of it, any of it, had been sincere. For all Jim cared, they resulted in the same answer. No. Of course not.

Again, Sherlock had the gall to show how privy he was to what Jim was thinking, shaking his head just as Jim landed on the 'no.' The reversal of their usual roles might have fascinated him in different circumstances, but in this particular instant, Sherlock’s placid batting away of Jim’s more emotionally-intoxicated statements felt mortifyingly familiar. He felt a momentary pang of shame at finding himself in the position he so loved to put Sherlock and everyone else in, before it drove him to physicality. He shoved Sherlock into the nightstand and out of his way, intending to go for his clothes. "Cold, Sherlock. But I guess that's what you're going for."

"Tell me, then,” Sherlock called over his shoulder with a grating calm, having regained his balance. “Tell me. You know better than anyone. What could I do if my sister finally broke apart? Worse. What could I do if something were to happen and it wasn’t like what I’m used to now?  What if it wasn't clever at all, what if an idiot picked to set a bomb off on a random square for no discernible reason. How would I respond to the absurd and unforeseeable?"

He refused to turn around or to say anything, to make any noise but to pant angrily at him. _Why, Sherlock, it's so obvious, isn't it?  Why, you would need Lestrade and everyone on the force to answer to you directly and without question. You would need an assistant who had literally nothing else in their life but to be at your beck and call 24 hours a day. And, if you really wanted to foresee the unforeseeable, well, then you would need a thousand eyes in the sky and the ability to command them to point in any direction_. He hated him, hated him profoundly because he couldn't disagree with him or even fault him for a repulsively selfless decision. 

"Precisely," Sherlock answered as if he'd said it all aloud. “Even you. Suppose your ‘getting much richer’ necessitates you making a point to important people on the same day and in the same place that he happens to be out with her. Him, or any of the mummies and daddies in London taking their little girls to the shops on the wrong day. What then? Who else is to stop you from here on out?”

"Is _that_ what it takes?” Jim spun around, shaking a little in his fury. "Fine. _Easy_ , actually. We’ve done all that before, we'll do it again. Give me forty-five minutes and you can die in a wreck on your way there. We never have to set foot in Europe again." 

"We could." Sherlock granted, already sounding tired. "Die again. But nature abhors a vacuum and the next you might be stupid and still be worse.”

"That’s what they told you, then.” He stepped closer and with a death grip around Sherlock’s arm, turned Sherlock to face him. “The next Mycroft to keep them from me or the next me.” He bent his head down low to meet Sherlock’s eyes, whether he wanted them met or not. "Stay home. I can give them a better Mycroft than you any day." 

"No one told me anything. No one asked. I volunteered and they saw the sense in it. Besides, you're confusing the personal understanding that you and my brother came to with the department's policy towards you."

But, of course, they had. Had Jim been Smallwood himself, he would have picked to educate Sherlock's raw talent, checkered history and all, before hoping someone with more experience would rise to the occasion. Drugs were one thing, though, and already a gamble. What could he possibly say to Mycroft's former superiors to convince them of just how well he would behave if it came down to this? 

"Anyway, look at me. You wouldn’t want this.”

Jim laughed a little hysterically, searching his eyes more fervently, "And you do?  _You?_ You're already going to be late. You won't last six months behind a desk and, if you do, they'll find you dead in your office within a year." He blurted out in an absurd and hyperbolic estimate. 

"It’s different. I didn’t understand before, either.” It turned out that, after all, Jim didn’t want to hold Sherlock’s dispassionate gaze and it was his own turn to avert his eyes. Sherlock closed his eyes and sighed. “It’s different when something depends on you. You’ll give it all up, you’ll turn into whatever you…”  
  
“I know!” Jim yelled back and sat back down on the edge of the bed, putting his face in his hands, not wanting or needing to ever hear the rest of that sentence.

“I know.” Sherlock’s phone buzzed in his pocket and snapped him away from the moment. “It’s…probationary. Lady Smallwood was very clear about the ground rules.”  
  
Jim chuckled at himself, sardonically, from behind his hands. To think, to be this close to having him one hour and to be a ‘ground rule’ the next. He wasn’t ever one to pass up laughing at misfortune, even his own.  
  
“I imagine I’ll at least be hearing from you, then,” Sherlock said, evidently attempting to maneuver an awkward exit. His— _his?_ —black sedan was probably here. He moved away from the bed to gather his briefcase and his coat.

Jim stared straight ahead and nodded, having brought his hands down to a tight ball in front of his mouth, still too raw and disbelieving to answer with anything more than that. He imagined that this was some repetition of the first day of dear old Uncle Rudy’s, and Mycroft’s, and the whole wretched dynasty of Deputy Regional Coordinators ‘ pointless, self-effacing, hideously restrained lives. The first in a series of days that added up to a lifetime of throwing themselves and much of what they might have otherwise loved away for someone else.  
  
“It’s raining,”  he said at Sherlock’s retreating back in the doorway, determined to keep the hot tears of fury at bay until he was at least completely gone.  
  
“Take your umbrella.”


End file.
